Brutal Knicks loss exposed fragility of Magic offense

The Magic were held scoreless over a four-minute stretch in the second quarter and then held scoreless again during a six-minute, 21-second stretch in the third quarter.

Afterward, Magic players said one of the problems was that the Knicks were athletic enough to render the Magic's pick-and-roll game ineffective.

When Orlando ran a pick-and-roll involving anybody except Dwight Howard, the Knicks defenders involved in the pick-and-roll typically switched their defensive assignments on the fly. So, for example, when the Magic ran a pick-and-roll with J.J. Redick and Glen Davis early in the second quarter, Knicks big man Josh Harrellson simply started guarding Redick on the perimeter, and Knicks swingman J.R. Smith started guarding Davis.

That defensive tactic enabled the Knicks to keep their other three defenders relatively static instead of being forced to leave their assignments to help. As a result, the Magic found it difficult to get open shots.

"They played a similar defense to the Hawks, where they're switching 1 through 4," Redick said. "We rely on ball movement and on multiple pick-and-rolls, and we got bogged down there because we just seemed to be going to 2-4 pick-and-rolls, 1-4 pick-and-rolls over and over and over again and just weren't getting anything out of it. We've got to pick-and-roll more with the 5, especially Dwight, when teams switch, because they don't want to switch on him."

VC's homecoming

Vince Carter's tenure with the Magic started with such high hopes. The team acquired him shortly after its appearance in the 2009 NBA Finals and hoped he would serve as the go-to scorer it needed to win a title.

Tonight, Carter, now 35, will play at Amway Center for the first time since the trade.

"I think Vince did a lot of good things for us," Magic General Manager Otis Smith said. "He gave us a scorer when we needed a scorer, so I thought he had a pretty good year and a half."

That said, Smith did make the trade, and he maintains that the move was less about Carter than about shoring up other areas.

"I saw our team was kind of teetering," Smith said. "We weren't clicking on all cylinders. We were average, at best. It was an opportunity to do some things a little different. J-Rich could score different ways. Turk could handle [the ball] different ways and take all the pressure off of Jameer [Nelson] having to handle so much."

The Suns waived Carter after the lockout ended, largely because it meant they only had to pay him $4 million of the $18 million left on his contract.

Carter then signed with the Mavericks, and through Wednesday, he had started 33 of Dallas' 51 games and was averaging 9.8 points per game on 41.0 percent shooting.

Layups

• The Magic did not practice Thursday.

• Orlando turned the ball over 19 times in the loss to New York, leading to 24 Knicks points.